AMD Athlon XP 2700+ And NVIDIA's nForce 2

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The AMD Athlon XP 2700+ With The nForce 2 - Page 4

The first gaming related test we ran was with MadOnion's DirectX8 benchmark, 3DMark2001 SE. Keep in mind that this is the first time we have used ATi's new Radeon 9700 Pro in anything other than a video card comparison, so the gaming scores may be higher than you're used to seeing!

MadOnion 3DMark2001SE (Build 330)

DirectX 8 Performance

AMD still has some work to do if they want to catch Intel in this benchmark. As video cards have become more and more powerful, system memory bandwidth and CPU performance have had a larger impact on 3DMark scores. In 3DMark2001's default benchmark (1024x768x32), the 2700+'s higher clockspeed and FSB help it surpass the 2600+ by about 5%, but the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 was still the king in this test, besting the 2700+ by 670 points.

Novalogic's Comanche 4

CPU intensive DirectX 8 benchmarking

Novalogic's Comanche 4 benchmarking demo was designed to compare the relative performance of DirectX graphics accelerators, but it sure does benefit by the increased horsepower provided by a fast CPU! We ran this test at 640x480x32 with no audio, and saw the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 with PC1066 RDRAM outrun the Athlon XP 2700+ / nForce 2 combo by 5.4 frames per second, or 10.2%.

Quake 3 Time Demo

Fragin' at Top Speed

As it has gotten older, and graphics accelerators have gotten faster, Quake 3 Arena has become rather irrelevant as a video card benchmark, but it is now a good indicator of relative CPU performance. We set Quake 3 Arena v1.17 to 640x480x16, at its "Fastest" graphics setting, and ran a timedemo using "Demo001".

We were pleasantly surprised by the performance of the Athlon XP 2700+ and the nForce 2 in this test. Traditionally, the Pentium 4 has been the undisputed ruler in Quake 3 performance, but the new Athlons, coupled with the nForce 2, have pulled right along side Intel flagship CPU. As we mentioned earlier, we didn't have an Athlon XP 2800+ available for testing, but we're fairly certain it would have surpassed the performance of the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 in this test.